Foxe made his face grin at the idea, as if to appease Lisa-Anna’s ghost. He deliberately didn’t look to see whether any of the dresses would have suited her, but went and found a white suit of roughly the right size, a new shirt, tie, socks, shoes even, and carried the loot back to his bed, shutting the ghosts away. As he dumped them something scuttered close by. His heart gave a nervy flicker, then he remembered what it must be and opened the drawer of the bedside table. Quentin peered up at him, jet-eyed.
“Sorry, mate,” said Foxe. “I forgot. I should have taken you with me—you wouldn’t have let me muck around with that sort of stupid fancy, uh? Come and have a bath.”
As he spoke it occurred to him to wonder whether the room was bugged. Probably. In which case he had added yet another involuntary pebble to the cairn of Quentin’s supposed magic powers.
The bath-taps might or might not have been gold. The gadget by the bed had got the temperature wrong, so Foxe adjusted it by hand, then climbed in for a long soak. Quentin skated round the bath’s wide rim but never quite slithered in. He ate some pink soap which sadly didn’t make him froth at the mouth. Foxe watched him, and continued his line of thought. Was he in fact, subconsciously but deliberately, engineering incidents which built up Quentin’s reputation? The way he had used him in the Pit had, at a rational level, been fairly childish, and at the same time the subconscious motive had been close enough to the surface for him to be vaguely aware of it. In fact his subconscious might long ago have registered the magical symbol on the walls of Back Town, and made the connection with the letter Q. It was even possible that that had influenced him in deciding that Quentin was a nutter … And thus made Quentin a nutter? Quentin, for reasons beyond research, was now trying to drag a large sponge to the corner which he seemed to have decided was his own territory. Foxe watched him with considerable affection, a sentiment strong enough to draw attention to itself. He, Foxe, also seemed to believe in the power of the rat, not as a bearer of mighty magicks, but as a charm, a totem. He remembered how the touch of fur had broken the Prime Minister’s hypnotic hold. It was only natural: his subconscious, much-repressed, would reach out for symbols of help from the region in which Foxe really did have power. On perilous journeys it would seek to take with it a piece of Foxe’s home territory, where the kindly and predictable gods of science ruled. A lab-bred rat, for instance.
Again, Foxe’s attention was caught by his own mental processes, by the fact that he had for once let his subconscious out of the dungeons for exercise and air, had even allowed it a momentary vote. The process gave him an odd feeling of being two people, one of whom lived and moved so precisely in the same space as the other that it was normally invisible, but now for the moment had shifted a little, so that its shadowy outline was there, like an image on an ill-tuned television, like Foxe’s own reflection in the doubled glass of the laboratory window, that day when he had waited for the Prime Minister to come and had watched the gardener killing the snake.
“Do you think I’m becoming a bit schizo, mate?” he said. “They say it’s a common response to stress.”
Startled by his voice Quentin let go of the sponge. Because his paws got no grip on the glassy surface he had been using the curve of the rim for leverage and now, without the sponge’s weight to hold him back, he fell with a plop into the bath.
“Twenty-thirty-five now, suh,” urged the voice from the speaker.
“Coming,” said Foxe.
He picked Quentin from the huge warm towel on which he’d been grooming himself dry and put him in the pocket of his dinner-jacket. It was a tightish squeeze, but Foxe didn’t want him nicked by some magical power-maniac. And besides that, he thought, I’m scared, so I take my totem along.
The lift worked. The white-jacketed prisoner-slave in the lobby where Foxe had been told to wait made an excellent Martini. The air-conditioning was well-tuned, producing an atmosphere that smelt and felt like fresh air and yet was cooler than a tropic evening. In a way this was a contrast with the outside world even more striking than the one between the luxury of the palace and the emaciating poverty beyond. That it should actually be possible to buy efficiency here! But why not? It was ridiculous to suppose that nothing on the Islands ever worked properly. Captain Angiah, for instance, gave an impression of dedicated efficiency, and according to Dreiser the secret police did their work with skill … It was even possible, Foxe thought, that Doctor Trotter regarded efficiency as a luxury, to be enjoyed by the few, that for the masses he preferred the bus services to be erratic, the electric supply to keep failing. His bent, certainly, was towards chaos.
For at least twenty minutes Foxe waited, gazing out of the window at the dockyard scene. Gangs of men were still unloading the ships, sharp-shadowed under bluish floodlights. Above the castle’s silhouetted crenellations the same acid light glowed, a Satanic aureole, showing that the courtyard, like the docks and Pit, knew no proper dark. While he watched the gesticulating derricks a fresh shift arrived from the castle, so he guessed the work went on all night. Soon after that the steam-engine started another run, its fountain of smoke glowing orange and pricked with upshot sparks. The previous shift staggered away into the dark, one or two of them leaning so heavily on comrades’ shoulders that they were really being carried. At last came the sigh and suck of a moving lift and the whisper of doors. A familiar voice filled the air.
“… when I say bad time coming, then bad time do be coming. That’s sure. Here you are, my clever honey boy, condriving yourself to be Prime Minister and this and that, and still you never know to be serious. Who’s an empty man?”
Her voice was blanketed by the Prime Minister’s laugh. Nape prickling, Foxe turned and watched her waddle towards him.
“Hi, Foxy!” she cried. “Coming home special for to see you!”
She was wearing an extremely décolléte long dress of coffee-coloured satin, covered with seed-pearls and sequins. A display of opals lay on the broad shelf of her bosom, as if being proffered for Foxe to choose from. Strings of pearls and other jewels threaded the amber stook of her hair. She was still wearing her reflecting sunglasses in which Foxe could watch himself, double and miniaturised, bowing like a stage count. At the same time he registered that her greeting, if taken at face value, meant that she at least hadn’t been expecting him to arrive that day, so that if Ladyblossom’s death was part of a long-planned plot to trap him onto Main Island, she was not in the plot. Small comfort.
“It’s an honour to meet you again, ma’am,” he said.
“Just the family tonight, Doctor,” said the Prime Minister. “Come along, Mother, we mustn’t keep His Excellency waiting.”
“You take my arm, Foxy,” ordered Mrs Trotter.
She hauled him close against her side, like a liner warping a tender to her. Foxe was thankful that Quentin was in his opposite pocket or he would have been pulped against her corsetry.
They ate in what Foxe guessed was the state banqueting room, just the four of them sitting along one side of the table on the end dais and looking down the length of two more tables, all set with cutlery and plates and glasses for something like a hundred diners, and decorated with gushers of exotic flowers and ziggurats of fruit and tall candles, every one of them burning. Some twenty of the prisoner-servants stood around the walls, as if ready for an inrush of guests; in fact Foxe wondered whether a hundred servings of the nine or so courses which he was offered had been prepared. He drank champagne, then hock, then better claret than he’d ever tasted, then port of the same snob-value. The Prime Minister and Mrs Trotter drank milk and the President Coca-Cola. At first Foxe thought that this had been laid on as part of the Prime Minister’s deliberate caprice, a super-luxurious prelude to some new degradation of him; but slowly he came to perceive that it was normal, that even when the others were away the President would dine thus alone, humming and fidgeting.
The President said nothing throughout the mea
l and appeared not even to notice Foxe sitting on his right. He showed himself quite capable of handling a knife and fork, if with rather messy results, but mostly his mother, sitting on his left, would lean across and cut up his food for him and then feed him mouthful by mouthful. A couple of times she opened her reticule and withdrew a little sachet of paper from which she sprinkled a powder on his food. While she did so she muttered rapidly. One of these ingredients sent the President into a convulsion of coughing, and Foxe saw out of the corner of his eye the President’s attendant—the same whom he’d seen that morning—moving forward with an enamel basin but it wasn’t needed.
Mrs Trotter treated all these distractions as negligible, talking almost continuously either across the President to Foxe or across both of them to her other son. Foxe was naïvely surprised how much of the world she’d seen, and what a collection of notables she had met. For instance, she was critical of the decor of both Buckingham Palace and the White House, but considered the Shah of Iran “discriminading.” She spoke at length of a meal she’d had in Taiwan as “best in the world, better than the President of France giving me.” This was all small-talk, but had to be listened to, as she snapped for attention the moment Foxe’s mind began to wander.
Somewhere around the middle of the meal—after a course of plump little birds which had been delicately boned and then stuffed, so that they could be eaten whole—the President gave a long, gargling sigh and fell asleep. Mrs Trotter patted his cheek fondly, then nodded to the attendant, who brought up a gadget like a small fork-lift truck, ran it under the President’s chair and wheeled him away.
“The Lord give,” said Mrs Trotter, her voice thicker than ever with solemnity and emotion, “and then He rob you blind with His free hand. He give me one clever son and then He say, ‘That’s enough for this old witch,’ and he give me one stupid son. You think I treating the boy right, Foxy?”
“Well, how are you treating him, ma’am?”
With an eager sweep of her arm she shoved the President’s remaining cutlery to one side, like an old general clearing a space to demonstrate how he fought his last campaign, and emptied her reticule onto the table—leaves, sachets, ampoules, pill-boxes and withered shreds of what looked like skin and sinew.
“Lord, Lord,” she croaked, “the things a woman carries round. That marra root stale, for sure. What this bit? What you think this bit, Foxy?”
She had been peering at the collection with her nose a scant couple of inches from the table, but still didn’t remove her glasses, which must have been almost opaque in the candle-light. Foxe looked at the leaf-like scrap she poked towards him. How on earth could he be expected … but there was something familiar about it.
“Some kind of ear,” he said, decisively. “Not a rat’s—it’s too large and thin. A bat’s, perhaps.”
“Right. Bat-ear,” she mumbled, snatching it back. She had known, of course, and wanted to see if he knew. “Still good, but don’ give him that, for sure. Snake-apple—that last forever …”
“Mother, you’re not carrying snake-apple round with you?” said Doctor Trotter in a teasing voice. “There’s a law against that, you know. Interesting plant, Doctor—at one time I hoped your Company might find a pharmaceutical use for it, but it seems that the Creator planted it for no other purpose than to kill people.”
“So I gather …” began Foxe, but missed his moment.
“Foxy know all that,” snapped Mrs Trotter, as if calling an unruly meeting to order. “Now this I give my boy Mondays, ’cept when the moon full.”
“What is it?” asked Foxe, eyeing the greyish granules in her palm.
“Owl-crap.”
“Aha.”
She seemed to take the grunt for qualified approval, and throughout the next course rattled on about her campaign for the President’s health. It was like street warfare: in every artery, lurking along the bowel, holed up in pancreas and kidney, were hostile troops that had to be winkled out with high-explosive laxatives and herbal flame-throwers and the hideous hand-to-hand of charm and philtre. Meanwhile the city was under siege; assassins ringed its walls with knives and spells, and other-worldly enemies hovered above it, hoping to snatch its chief treasure, her son’s mighty soul. To Foxe the spells she used, the dangers she named, were mostly silly mumbo-jumbo, but slowly a historical logic became clear. Like a child playing hospitals with a doll, she had dosed her son since he was born with any ingredient that amused her. It sounded as if he might have been a comparatively normal baby, and now he was this … this thing.
“What you think, Foxy?” she snapped, catching him by surprise because she didn’t seem to have finished her recital.
“Oh … Well, I think perhaps you’re overdoing it,” he said. Very little of him wanted to laugh. Her methods were ridiculous, but the horror of the effect kept his tone grave.
“What you mean?” she said sulkily.
“You see, drugs aren’t simple things. They have more than one effect on the body, and if you use them together they affect each other’s effects. Sometimes you have to use more than one drug, perhaps to suppress a side-effect or something like that, but you don’t if you can help it. And on top of that two drugs may have a side-effect which neither of them has alone. A lot of my job is looking for things like that, but even so we sometimes make mistakes. I remember a couple of years ago we had to withdraw a stuff we’d just brought out, a decoagulant for thrombosis cases, when we found that if the patient had been taking a very common tranquilliser—even if he’d stopped taking it several weeks before—he got severe bleeding of the intestine.”
The pout of her mouth lessened, she began to nod, assimilating Foxe’s mumbo jumbo to hers. The Prime Minister laughed.
“You’ll have a job persuading my mother to leave anything out of her recipes. You’re a vicarious hypochondriac, Mother.”
“Nothing to do with you, O,” she said. “The Lord cheat me there, Foxy—give me this clever son with no soul, and that stupid son with a ’normous soul—soul big ’nough for two men.”
“The Lord arranged things very well,” said the Prime Minister, somehow adjusting his tone to share amusement and disbelief with Foxe and acceptance and credulity with his mother.
“That for sure,” she croaked, appeased. “That why this my son get so strong, Foxy. Enemies, they can go for to shoot him, go for to poison him, but they can’t lay for his soul, cause of for him an empty man. Right, and you tell me I giving that my other son too many these things?”
“I’d have said so, though it isn’t my field, really. Perhaps rather more exercise, to let them work out of his body … I don’t think you need cut down on the incantations, because I doubt if they have side-effects in the same kind of way …”
“Right. Right. You’re a good boy, Foxy. You help this my son, I look after that my other son.”
She swept her ingredients into her reticule, rose and waddled away down the hall. The servants shut their eyes and bowed as she passed.
“You managed that very well,” said Doctor Trotter. “It is important not to treat my mother as a fool. She is a woman of very great … abilities.”
The last sentence was clearly a euphemism. As a man of education and experience Doctor Trotter could not of course say that his mother had the power, but that was what he meant.
“Yes, sir, I know, but …” Foxe began.
“Now you must tell me how you are getting on with my experiment,” said the Prime Minister.
“I’ve hardly begun yet, sir,” said Foxe. A dark hand, white-sleeved, emaciated, slid in front of him a plate of ice-cream sculptured to the shape of a turtle. It snagged his attention.
“I’d rather not talk about it till we’re alone, sir,” he said.
“We are alone. Ah, I see. These people are hardly likely to bear witness against you, Doctor.”
“It isn’t that,” said Foxe, with some
of the energy and confidence which came from stepping into his own field. “You want this experiment to work—to produce a result which has some meaning. I don’t think it will, but I’m going to do my best, so it’s not my fault if it doesn’t. Now, one thing which will make any results completely useless will be if the subjects know what’s expected of them—or even guess. If the slightest rumour got back …”
“They are totally isolated, Doctor.”
“Yes. That’s what makes the whole thing even faintly possible. But I’m not taking any risks. I’ve not read a lot of prison literature, but I do know how people seem to smuggle news in and out of what look like totally closed situations.”
Doctor Trotter’s face darkened, perhaps at Foxe’s obstinacy, perhaps at the notion of his victims eluding his power in even so slight a fashion. He ate several spoonfuls of ice-cream.
“I have a country to run, Doctor,” he said. “There are many things I can afford to leave to no one else, so I have not much time to spare. One advantage of bringing you here is that it means we can discuss the experiment over dinner, like this. My mother and brother usually leave well before the meal is over. I wish to follow your work very closely.”
(Meal after meal, night after night, in this place, under this pressure—the sirring, the baaing ma’ams, the soapy assents and cringing disagreements—watching the President being fed, adjudicating on the dried entrails of frogs … Foxe could see only one way out, and started to work towards it.)
Walking Dead Page 13